To Close
It is challenging to end a book that I hope has opened up more questions
and topics than it has resolved. Indeed, I have done little beyond argue that
Chinese martial arts has a history. The category of martial arts itself has
changed in the last century, and its meaning continues to undergo significant
transformation. Chinese martial arts is now an international product subject
to globalization, commercialization,and nationalism. The Chinese govern-
ment still struggles to control martial arts as part of its larger policy of
controlling all aspects of Chinese culture–and to define what it is in a
universal way. This is impossible, of course, as are the current government’s
efforts at control in other areas of Chinese culture. Local traditions of Chinese
martial arts, both inside and outside China’s borders, will continue to exist
outside the Chinese government’s grasp. Martial arts still resides in the
martial artist who gives it meaning through individual practice and teaching.
All cultures have martial arts, yet Chinese martial arts is distinctive.
A knowledgeable person can distinguish between the martial arts of Japan,
Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines, and perhaps those of a few other
cultures, with a fair degree of certainty. Individual arts or styles developed
within these cultures are also obviously different. In the West, by contrast,
unarmed forms of combat are much more similar across nationalities.
Western boxing and wrestling have been made more uniform through sports
competitions, which have limited innovation and stifled any large stylistic
differences. Asian martial arts, by contrast, is extremely diverse, retaining the
markers of its disparate histories.
Fighting arts do not simplify over time to an imagined ideal system of
combat in which experience has left only the effective techniques. There are
simply too many combat techniques and too many possible combat situa-
tions to lead to simplification. Moreover, no individual martial artist can
master all the possible combat skills. Despite this diversity, the individual
histories of different martial arts mark them. Chinese martial arts remains
embedded in and emblematic of the culture and history it came from. It is a
historical product, replicated and modified over time, changing but recog-
nizably the same. Politics,fiction, religion, and medicine have all had their
role in shaping Chinese martial arts withoutfixing it into a single, simple
practice with a unified meaning. Even grounding the study of martial arts in
historical research cannot eliminate the mystery of its effects, its attractions,
or its nature. Something is always uncertain. To paraphrase the paradig-
matic dialogue of so many badly translated martial arts movies,“Kungfu is
very good, but still...”
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